In the past few years, cellular telephones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's), messaging devices, and other portable electronic devices having communication capabilities have become a staple of everyday life. It is not uncommon for the average person to possess more than one communication device. As these devices evolve the prices decline while the feature set expands. With the decline in price, the communication devices attract a broader portion of the economic demographic. The increased demand and revenue generated by the popularity allows for the expansion of systems and capabilities, making such devices useful in many places. This allows wireless connection to telephone systems, processing of email, playing electronic games, accessing the Internet and other various communication functions. It is anticipated as the decline in price continues combined with the expansion of features the use and demand of such device will become an integral and permanent part of peoples' everyday life. Device manufactures utilize technological innovation to carefully balance excitement and fun against convenience and simplicity to use. Device customers strive to improve productivity while being ahead of the crowd with customization and applications. Though customers sometimes focus on productivity at the same time their desire for devices is often stimulated by entertainment, gaming and additional capabilities. To meet customer demands device manufactures have created devices that allow users to have multiple voice and data connections, and speakerphones and including capabilities to selectively mute audio connections.
Prior art devices offer a single muting scheme. Some devices offer mute by cutting off any audio from being delivered from a local, or near-end, device to a remote, or far-end, device. Other devices offer mute by creating a noise signal that is delivered from the local device to the remote device. Unfortunately, a single muting scheme may not be desirable in all situations for users of these devices. This constrained muting scheme can lead to inconvenience and frustration of such users, resulting in detrimental perception of value of these devices. Regrettably, this can negatively affect commercial viability in an increasingly competitive marketplace for such devices.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.